


bird balloons

by cryptidgay



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Character Death, Character Undeath, F/F, He/Him Lesbian Allison Abbott, Mike Townsend (is in the male fridge sorry mike)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29277648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: Jaylen knows, the moment one of the drift techs suggests offhand that she try drifting with Allie, that it’s a bad idea.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Allison Abbott
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	bird balloons

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [thalassophobia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434339) by [kosy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy). 



> for a tumblr prompt from [rai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paopuleaf/pseuds/paopuleaf) for "23 (“I immediately regret this decision.”) with a dealer's choice of au jaylen" !! 
> 
> hugely inspired by sim's wonderful pacrim au fic [thalassophobia.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434339) as per usual, he/him allie abbott + most of the allie characterization here is inspired by [my gf luke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vasnormandy/pseuds/vasnormandy)'s allie headcanons!
> 
> title from bird balloons by lady lamb!
> 
>  **content warnings:** descriptions of past character death & a very panicky drift.

Jaylen knows, the moment one of the drift techs suggests offhand that she try drifting with Allie, that it’s a bad idea.

She knows this somewhere distant in her mind, omnipresent background radiation — the same way that, when kaiju begin spilling from the breach again, she’ll be able to predict with a hundred-percent accuracy when it’ll happen long before the nerds down in k-science figure it out. Her instinct is to say no. She almost says no — almost says _fuck no, absolutely not, we aren’t dragging him into this,_ almost storms out of the room and slams the door on her way out.

But she has to be a good little pilot to prove Mike was right to drag her out of the breach. At the very least, she has to avoid getting into fights. She’s made sure half the jaeger program will never get in a cockpit again just by drifting with them, something inside her mind breaking something in theirs, and she’s made the other half terrified of her; they scatter when she walks through the halls, as if her death is contagious. 

They would not have let Mike rescue her if they’d known it would cause this much trouble. That’s another thing she knows; she’s still deciding how she feels about it. Parker would’ve sent every jaeger the program had left to follow Mike into the ocean, drag him kicking back to shore.

The least she can do, in their eyes, is find a copilot who can drift with her without collapsing with blood leaking from their goddamn eyes. Current record’s forty-four seconds of drifting with Jaylen; in the droves of pilots they’ve sent since Henderson’s failure, no one else has gotten close, and clearly they’re fucking _desperate_ if they’re asking for Allie, who has never wanted to be a pilot, never trained to be one. Allie teaches music. Allie hangs around the mechbay because that’s where Jaylen is, most days, and he is the only one who treats Jaylen the same as he did before she was declared missing in action and presumed dead, the only one who hasn’t made a huge fucking deal out of her being dragged out of the breach with her eyes the color of kaiju blood, like something just as toxic was waiting inside her.

A part of Jaylen worries that drifting with Allie will change that. Jaylen is not a person prone to being honest, but she only lies to Allie in ways he’ll be able to detect; he rarely calls her bluff, but she knows he knows whenever she’s told him something untrue, and she knows he knows she has reasons for it. In this way, she’s more honest with him than she’s ever been with anyone else.

Drifting is a whole other level. She has walls built up she has no idea how to collapse; she isn’t even sure she’s the one who _built_ them. Jaylen hasn’t exactly been _gentle_ with the other pilots they send to drift with her, but she doesn’t know how much of what happens to them is in her control.

She worries, but distantly. It’s far enough back in her mind that, when the drift tech who’s name she’s already forgotten says “Jaylen? I suggested we bring — what’s his name, Abbott? To try drifting with you.” she nods, sharply, and turns on her heel to leave the room.

***

Three days later, Jaylen and Allie walk into the drift-sim chamber side by side.

It’s strange — she’s never actually come in at the same time as her prospective copilot before, never watched them strap into the helmet and connect the electric wires to their temple and pull the restraints over their arms and legs, just in case Jaylen sends them spasming to the hard metal floor. She’s never given a shit about who they are. The first few drifts, part of her was still too far gone to care what she was doing; the dozen or so following that, she’d learned to sink her expectations as low as they could possibly go. She’s learned to fight back the animal instinct to grin as blood-dripping drift partners are carried away on stretchers.

“You sure about this?” Allie says, turning his head to look at Jaylen. It’s clear in the way he moves that he isn’t trained for this; he doesn’t know what to do with the bulk of the suit, he shifts awkwardly to avoid running into the wires connecting him to the interface in front of them. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Jaylen wants to laugh. Of course she has to. She bites back the sound, smiles at him in a way she hopes is comforting. Everything about her has been too sharp since she returned, but if anyone could see past that, it’s Allie. That’s half the problem — it feels, sometimes, like he’s already inside her brain, and she cannot imagine something more intimate than taking that to its more literal conclusion.

(Drifting with Mike had never been so terrifying. They were best friends before they were copilots; she’d dragged him into the jaeger program alongside her; he’d been by her side for all her worst moments already, and her his, so nothing they saw in the drift could surprise either of them.

Drifting with Allie should be easy, for the same reasons. But Allie was not there for Jaylen’s worst moment. Mike was, and now Mike is gone. Allie grieved somewhere on land, untouched by the category-three that had dragged Jaylen screaming into the Pacific Ocean.)

Jaylen talks less now; when she opens her mouth she feels like she should still be screaming to be heard over the wind and rain and ocean and roaring kaiju, even safe on solid ground as she is now. She forces her voice to be low and steady as she replies: “C’mon, Allie, don’t fuckin’ chicken out on me now.”

She knows that he knows that it’s more for herself than for him. If Allie wanted to stop, she wouldn’t blame him.

“I wouldn’t,” Allie says, genuine as ever.

“I’m not scared,” Jaylen says, feeling laid bare already as she pulls the helmet over her face, double-checks by rote that all the wires are in the correct places.

“I know.”

The voice of one of the techs crackles through the speakers in their helmets. Jaylen knows they’re standing on the other side of the two-way mirror outside the simulation chamber, watching to see if Allie will be the person who cracks down Jaylen’s defenses at long last, or if their last-ditch effort will be a total fucking disaster. _“You guys ready?”_

Jaylen nods. “Yes,” Allie says, like he’s sure of it.

_“Initiating neural handshake in five, four, three, two —”_

***

Jaylen has not successfully drifted with anyone since Mike.

It was almost a joke, with Mike — they would bitch at each other about whatever they’d caught floating off the other’s mind, act like they were psychic when really it was just ghost drift, fully scientific. Jaylen’d play her bass and Mike would pick up his guitar and they would be in perfect sync, even writing songs off the cuff; by the time she died, it felt like they were always drifting on some level, always a little bit in each other’s heads. That was fine with Jaylen. She’d trusted Mike with every stupid fucking thought she had, and he’d trusted her the same.

Part of Mike died with Jaylen. When she was thrown into the sea from a height that _must_ have killed her on impact, she was still so intertwined with him that she couldn’t tell where she started and he ended; she couldn’t tell if she was screaming or if he was, or both. Mike would have far too much time to ponder the same question, and would die without an answer.

Part of Jaylen must have died with Mike, too. He’d brought her back, but not _all of her,_ because he’d sacrificed himself in the process and even hardly-lucid as she was when her lifeboat sprung to the surface she’d felt him fall and fall until she could no longer feel anything, just a gaping emptiness.

Now, when she tries to drift, something breaks in her and the shattering echoes across the drift. Maybe Mike feels it, too, wherever he is, now.

***

_“Neural handshake calibrating.”_

Flashes of memory from Allie. Hanukkah with his dads growing up. The first time he wrote a song. Watching Trespasser land on TV, San Francisco, 2013; watching his dads discuss if they should flee Seattle, move inland, as far away from the Pacific as they could get. Meeting Jaylen. Mourning Jaylen.

It’s the furthest into a drift Jaylen has gotten since her return. It’s the most she’s let in from anyone else’s mind.

Jaylen’s funeral. Allie’s hands piling pebbles on Jaylen’s empty grave. Jaylen in the cockpit beside Mike. She can’t remember her jaeger’s name now, and isn’t that funny, the thing that killed her and the thing that brought her back and she can’t remember.

She can remember what it felt like to be inside it. The power. The ability to fight whatever storm came at them. Mike’s mind in her own. Her mind in Mike’s.

_“Out of alignment. You’re both out of alignment.”_

Jaylen ripped out of the jaeger by something unfathomably large. Never seen a kaiju from outside the jaeger before, not up close. Not a living one.

Jaylen thrown into the water, still conscious. Somehow. Jaylen underwater. Jaylen drowning for what felt like the entire six years she was gone.

“Jay?” Allie’s voice, distant. Right beside her. Unbelievably far away. Not there at all.

Jaylen dying. Jaylen gasping for breath —

“Shut it down,” she gasps. “I’m tapping out — stop the fucking drift, stop it.”

The connection between them severs, though the ghost of it remains; Allie’s concern, Allie’s fear, and worst of all, Allie’s love for her all sliding into her mind like a knife through the gaps in a ribcage. The hum of machines powering down around them overpowers the clattering of Jaylen’s helmet as she throws it off her head and onto the ground, the shattering of the glass in it; they’ll be angry with her for that, but she can’t bring herself to fucking care, not right now, not after _dying again._ Maybe not literally, but — does the distinction really fucking matter? Death twice feels the same as death once.

Allie is gentler with the equipment, coaxing the helmet off his head with one hand and reaching out to Jaylen with the other. She flinches away from the touch.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she says. Her voice shakes and she hates it for doing so. She wants to scream; she wants to tear the shatterdome apart with her bare hands. She wants to be something huge and monstrous and capable of vast destruction, not a woman trapped in a body too small to hold everything swirling within her.

Maybe the rest of the pilots are right to fear her. Maybe death and undeath have changed her in some irrevocable way.

Right now, she doesn’t care.

“Jay?” Allie doesn’t reach out again, but she can _feel_ how hard he’s clenching his fists to keep them by his side. He’s straining against the urge to take her into his arms and make promises he can’t keep, that everything will be fine, that nothing he saw changes how he feels, that they can try again if she wants.

Allie is physically fine. He lasted at least four times as long as the next-highest attempt, and his eyes are clear, and no blood drips from his nose. Jaylen did not hurt him, and some distant part of her is grateful for that, but it’s overpowered by the death lingering over her head, the way it felt to experience it again. The way it feels to know Allie was there with her.

Regret swirls deep in Jaylen’s stomach. She feels sick. “Don’t,” she says, even though he isn’t doing anything. “We’re not doing this again.”

She runs from the room as quickly as her trembling legs will carry her. Bares her teeth at the crowd of onlookers swarmed outside the door, waiting to see if Allie will be another to the line of copilots broken by Jaylen Hotdogfingers. As loudly as she can, she projects her thoughts to Allie through the ghost of their drift, already fading fast: _Don’t follow me. Please._

Jaylen needs to be alone.

**Author's Note:**

> thx for reading! hmu on tumblr @ rogueumpire, or in the crabitat discord. leave a comment if ya want!!


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